A quick note to share general data on gateway usage by Spreedly customers. (I did not include data on Spreedly Core customers) We support a lot of gateways. However, to keep things simple I focused in on our top 8.

Observations. Firstly, it’s surprising just how many of our customers use PayPal Payments Pro. More than 50%. Say what you will about PayPal, they are still the heavyweight in our division. The second is Stripe coming in at 10%. They’re a newer gateway that we support. So they’ve gone from 0 – 4% in 6 months. Pretty impressive. Lastly, I was impressed that eWay is running with the big dogs! Score one for the little Aussie battler.

The other thing I looked at are how many customers are using 1, 2 or 3 gateway’s with us. Here’s how that looks:

So a little under 10% of our customers have two or more gateways. Not that big a deal then right? Well, they’re also our largest customers. Looking at it via another metric can really change the view. Nearly 40% of all transactions are done by accounts with 2 or more gateways. The logical conclusion is our bigger customers are running multiple gateways for geographical, legacy and redundancy reasons. That’s definitely true – but it’s not the entire story.

When it comes to multiple gateways PayPal Payments Pro is again dominant – present in around 80% of of those customers running two or more gateways. More surprisingly, 60% of people using Stripe with Spreedly are using it in conjunction with another gateway. A significant amount appear to be PayPal Pro customers moving to Stripe. (Hard to not plug the benefits of Spreedly’s credit card vault here – cue trumpets!!) Another possible factor – because Stripe has no monthly recurring fees customers (U.S only of course) have them there purely as a “back up” plan in case something goes terribly wrong with their single gateway

The conclusion then is larger customers are using multiple gateways for all the reasons listed above. However, smaller customers utilize the benefit of gateway independence too – the motivations might just be different. Thought I would just quickly share the data. Let me know if there are any comments or questions.

Web development shops focused on commerce tend to really like Spreedly Core. Here is a recent interaction I had with Luke at Spook & Puff Based in the beautiful Barossa Valley (imagine Napa/Sonoma) in South Australia, the guys at Spook and Puff just went live with a new client on Spreedly Core. It seems like a simple cut and paste of our email dialogue is easiest:

“Previously our client was using custom code — written in ASP/VB — to accept payment details and process payments via a gateway. The biggest issue was that the payment details were not being stored securely, certainly not to the requirements of PCI-DSS. Additionally they had no way to automatically process refunds. We recommended Spreedly Core for a couple of reasons.

The most obvious is it removes the burden of PCI-DSS compliance. This is something the client was completely unaware of. I can foresee we’re going to be spending more time in the future educating clients about what it is and why it is important.

Secondly, having a common API across different gateways means we can easily switch the client to another gateway with minimal hassle. I also like the simplicity of the API, which made it very easy for me to write my own library code. Often I’ve been caught in the situation where I want to use an API, but existing libraries aren’t up to snuff. Knowing I can easily roll my own code without going crazy is a comfort.

Our basic experience with Spreedly Core is this; it’s nice to use something that just works!

Also, each time I’ve had to contact you guys about something the response has been quick and friendly, which could seem a small thing to some, but I really appreciate it. So thanks to you guys for being so nice.

I fully intend for us to keep using Spreedly Core and I would happily recommend the service to anyone else. Probably something along the lines of “just use it!” :)”

Following up on a blog past from last week I thought I would delve a little deeper into scenario 1: Why would I use Spreedly with just a single gateway? Here’s a quick recap from that longer post:

“First scenario: Plain old single gateway: “Why would I use Spreedly Core vs just going with a single gateway/merchant account?” Great question! When we ask the question, “Do you think you’ll always want to use the same gateway/merchant account for ever?” people usually pause. Honestly, sometimes the answer is yes – this is a side business, etc. However, for most people the answer is no. So then the question becomes: “Are you going to have your business logic, your customers’ credit cards and your cash flow all in one location?” With many gateways the cost of Core can be offset against credit card vault costs. It therefore becomes a bit of a head scratcher on why you wouldn’t use Core (you see what we did there?)”

There are 3 reasons why many businesses’ change gateways/merchant accounts. One, the current gateway/merchant account you work with feels like a disconnect. There’s something about the way they do business that you don’t like. In more extreme examples they place a freeze on your account. In the second example you like your current solution but as you grow your needs become more sophisticated. You need to accept payment types in other regions that your solution doesn’t support. You need more sophisticated fraud and tracking prevention. The last reason is the most obvious – as you grow you can command better rates.

Here are some examples of each of these. If you have any good examples, let me know and I’ll update this with appropriate links.

One of the most unique ways you might get in trouble and have your account frozen? By making too much money. It’s true. This article goes into greater detail. In our world of subscription customers early red flags to us are prospective customers stating “I’m going to just have an annual plan at $1000+”

From Four Bean Soup: This one is from an actual Spreedly customer who had issues with PayPal. I suspect if this was written more recently the answer probably would have involved switching to Stripe:

Here’s one just this month from Dan Grossman and his frustration with a lack of transparency in pricing and fees. Ironically, Dan was at one point briefly a Spreedly customer – but not for this project. Not surprising a new wave of merchant account/gateway’s has found success when you look at this type of invoice.

Another Spreedly Core customer found an known issue in a gateway when processing Canadian transactions that caused a lot of failed transactions unnecessarily. The problem? Many of their customers were Canadian. Their merchant account, not realizing Spreedly was involved, informed them they’d have to apply for a new gateway and be accepted, would not be able to get their existing customer data back from their current gateway, and code against the new gateway API to get up and running. A process of weeks not days. However, instead they were up and running in less than 72 hours on a new gateway because Spreedly had their customer data and we’d done the work of integrating to the selected gateway.

It matters too in which order you proceed. If you get a merchant account first, and they then bundle in a gateway, that gateway is often under contractual obligation not to let you switch to another merchant account should you become unhappy. If you sign up with the gateway first then you can switch merchant accounts. Confusing huh? Well, it all makes sense when you realize the merchant account is really the customer in the first scenario. You can try and stay one step ahead of the reasoning – or use Spreedly as a go to plan.

Ok lastly (and most importantly?). Cost. I used the service over at FeeFighters. If you haven’t used the service it’s well worth the time and fun to play with. I told them my site does $20 000 per month and my average transaction is $50. I did it all online (vs storefront) and accept AMEX etc. Here’s my best quote:

Let’s compare that to the starting rate of most blended gateway/merchant account fees of 2.9% and 30 cents.

0.8% savings on $20 000 per month + 9 cents per transaction savings. $160 in merchant account savings + $36 in transaction fees = $196 per month or just under $2,500 per year.

Let’s say you now move to $200,000 per month. Per Feefighters your best rate is 2.01% and 19 cents per transaction. Now you’re monthly savings are a little over $26,000 a year. So as an organization, once you reach just $3 million per year in revenue, you could probably add one more entry level sales person or customer support person by making that switch. Remember, these are still very low numbers I’m working with. Rates continue to drop as you grow.

All good reasons to pause before you take a single payment gateway/merchant account decision.

Recently, we re-worked our home page. One of our goals was to drive more traffic to Spreedly Core. It worked and now we’re started seeing some really interesting use cases emerging.

Spreedly Core is Spreedly without the subscription logic/UI. Spreedly Core aims to do the following well:

• Securely vault and store credit card information with tokenization and transparent redirects.
• Work with one or more than one gateway/merchant account at any point in time.
• Design or use whatever front end/application on top of Core.

First scenario: Plain old single gateway: “Why would I use Spreedly Core vs just going with a single gateway/merchant account?” Great question! When we ask the question, “Do you think you’ll always want to use the same gateway/merchant account for ever?” people usually pause. Honestly, sometimes the answer is yes – this is a side business, etc. However, for most people the answer is no. So then the question becomes: “Are you going to have your business logic, your customers’ credit cards and your cash flow all in one location?” With many gateways the cost of Core can be offset against credit card vault costs. It therefore becomes a bit of a head scratcher on why you wouldn’t use Core (you see what we did there?).

Second scenario: Multiple gateways: We see people developing applications that connect buyers and sellers. A service that lets you sign up once and order from 100 local restaurants without having to enter your credit card 100 different times? That’s pretty valuable. An accounting application that lets your customers’ charge their customers directly from within the application? Also very helpful. Prior to Core you basically had to – well – build Core.

Third scenario: Ecommerce carts: Next month our first large ecommerce cart customer goes into production. We’re busy building out a connector to Magento (with more to follow). We’ll talk more about that as the time draws near. Needless to say ecommerce cart customers face the same set of challenges. Those looking to scale require flexibility and PCI secure vaults.

Fourth scenario: Platforms: Two non-US subscription services have integrated to Core. Non-US payment platforms, focused on making life easier for developers to transact online, are also building on Core.

The great thing is that work on Spreedly Core is also work on Spreedly subs. Every gateway we add improves our global reach. Soon we’ll add more payment types – offsite gateways and new, non credit card payment types. While we now have one time fees available at set up we’ll soon have a lot more flexibility to run recurring and one time fees side by side on an ongoing basis.

Providing a billing platform for recurring payments is a great way to meet and see a lot of interesting companies. Spreedly Core opens up our scope significantly, meaning we get to connect with even more people building really interesting applications.

I know we have a lot of customers very interested in churn metrics (as are we) Here’s a great, fairly in-depth post by @snoble over at Shopify. Enjoy! http://bit.ly/GHNlnO

Startups really have some unique needs that fell outside our current pricing. In general it followed this pattern:

• When launching my startup I build a “launch budget” to put everything in place. Once I feel comfortable that I can fund it I launch it.
• Once launched I have a ramping period where I’m very sensitive to fixed recurring costs that don’t scale in a direct linear fashion to revenue
  • (Incidentally, we often hear this as one factor why people might choose Stripe over Braintree – at least to begin with)
• The more ambitious start ups absolutely get the value of gateway independence but had to weigh that up against the costs of maintaining a gateway/merchant account fee structure and a Spreedly account.

With that in mind we launched some trial startup pricing in February. The idea is you pay a one time fee that would cover you for either 6 months or 12 months. After paying that one time fee there were no monthly recurring fees. You just pay transaction fees – direct alignment of costs with revenue.

We were very happy with the success of the program and the positive feedback we received in general. One interesting point to note – the 12 month option outsold the 6 month option by nearly 10 to 1. We’ve now relaunched the startup pricing on Spreedly in an permanent, ongoing fashion with two notable changes:

• We dropped the 6 month altogether (It just didn’t seem to resonate)
• We now define a start up as someone who will do 100 transactions or less in the first 90 days. After that, we don’t track how many you do. In fact, we hope you do very well!

That’s it. Now you have even less reason to begin life by putting all your eggs in just one basket. Freedom and ease…....

Hey everyone, I’m Scott, the newest addition to the development team here at Spreedly. My first contribution is live in production, and I’m excited to tell the world about it.

New guy, meet the deep end

So my first 3 weeks at Spreedly are behind me, and we’re about to launch my first development task – email templates. I spent a little while getting my development environment set up, and another good while digging into the codebase before I got around to hacking on my first feature. On the surface, email templates seemed like a small task for a new developer; however, as anyone who’s ever dealt with Icebergs or Shaving Yaks knows, this turned out to be a better exploratory task than I had expected.

Mustache, but not the kind you’re thinking of

Powering our new email templates is a tool called Mustache. We chose mustache because of its great developer library support, but also because it was intuitive enough for us to explain to our non-technical users that will be designing custom email templates. Mustache is much more powerful than we’re using it for, but we feel like it’s great for our limited application as well.

Turning on custom email templates

To get started, we’ll first need to turn on custom email templates for your site. The screenshots below show the process for you to do that.

Select the bottom option to “define your own custom email templates” and hit “Save”.

Once you’ve confirmed that you want to use your custom email templates, click the “define custom templates” link to be taken to the email template editor.

Once you’re on the editor screen, you will find a link to the integration reference for email templates. The integration reference will have all of the information you need to edit your templates with the data you want.

You can toggle between the 5 types of email templates we support (for the 5 types of emails we send to your customers). Also, flipping between edit and preview mode will allow you to preview a sample email in realtime.

Once you’ve modified all of your templates to your liking, click the “Save All Templates” button at the bottom of the page. That’s all!

Next Steps

We’d love feedback on the interface, so feel free to get started right away. Feedback can be sent to scott.klein@spreedly.com

On Wednesday February 8th we pushed a new version of Spreedly.com live. We did this in conjunction with our good friends at Knurture (this is a shameless plug for Knurture – if you enjoy this post, our changes in general and have a need you should connect with them). Two weeks is a good stop gap to look at some of the more immediate short term impacts.

Why the re-design? We had two goals in mind. We wanted to refresh our messaging around Spreedly and we wanted to drive more traffic/awareness to Spreedly Core.

Spreedly was arguably the first stand alone subscription service in our space. Great news! However, our website was also therefore the “oldest” and out of date. We were still selling all-wheel drive to a market that said “Yes I get it. Subscription businesses are great.” To continue with the car analogy we had to stop selling AWD. Instead, we had to determine if we were Audi or Subaru and then tell our customers and prospects that so they could self qualify. So who are we, what do we believe in, and who else has bought into our vision?

We defined ourselves by looking at the central principles behind Spreedly that we believe in. Or perhaps a better way to say it is “the things we don’t like to see in services we use”. Bad technology and lock in. Bad technology is pretty obvious. So what’s lock in? It’s a number of things:

After 20 years where PayPal was really the biggest and perhaps only change in our space suddenly there is an explosion of activity. On the payment processor side there is Square, Stripe, Samurai and more. The payment type side is even more exciting with Dwolla, Google Wallet, Amazon payments (and perhaps soon Facebook credits?) to contend with. That’s just from a US centric perspective. There’s a lot of activity going on in Asia and Europe. I had a call this week with a company well on their way to being “The Stripe of country X” wanting to build out on Spreedly Core. As I said, there’s a lot going on right now.

It’s a really exciting place to be due to the amount of change going on. Change though means you have to stay nimble. Companies have to constantly weigh the benefits of trying to do everything with a single vendor and risk lock in – or managing more than one vendor and having freedom. We’re firmly in the “Freedom and Ease!” camp – and that drove a lot of our new messaging.

On the product side SaaS is a tough model to scale deeply into product requirements (thus the rock and a hard place). Trying to do all things for all people is really difficult. Get too granular with features and new users are overwhelmed by the steep learning curve. Meanwhile your cutting edge and largest existing customers are trained to push you to make changes to the application to support just their specific needs. I personally have walked this path in a previous life – it’s tough. So our philosophy at Spreedly is to continue to focus on the big building blocks and leave the details to our customers as they grow. We think that’s the best approach to scale.

Our message to our prospective customers is “We believe in freedom and independence.” That doesn’t mean we’re right and our competitors are wrong. It’s much more nuanced than that. It means you have choice and can choose the approach that you like best.

Measurement

Ok, how do we measure whether our site redesign was a success? Well, first the metrics that probably don’t matter:

Number of visitors: Shouldn’t really be affected over two weeks (and it’s not)

Engagement: Time on site? Pageviews up or down? Well that’s a double edged sword. Remember, a worthy goal of many site redesigns is that your prospect spends less time on your site. It’s much quicker to get to what you want. So we didn’t really look there. Actually the only thing surprising comparing the two weeks before and after was how identical many of these stats looked (considering the site re-design was substantial on a number of levels) There were some random anomalies – our visitors from India spent 40% less time on the site after the change.

We decided that there would be two major proof points this early on. We focused in on two things during the first two weeks: i) how many more people visited our pricing page, and ii) what happened to the number of people signing up for trials?

Two weeks is too short to gauge new customer sign ups – people often spend longer than two weeks evaluating – so that wouldn’t work for now. Besides, winning a new customer is dependent upon a lot more than just your website.

Ok, let’s talk in % terms to protect the innocent. Here’s what we’re seeing on spreedly.com:

• % increase of pageviews (uniques) for our pricing page = 36%
• % increase in pageviews (uniques) to our sign up page = 22%
• % increase in trial sign ups in first full week vs floating 3 weeks prior = 30%

Our thinking on tracking the pricing page is if you look at a site and you feel it’s speaking to you then you’re likely to explore deeper in and review pricing. Some people look at a pricing page just because it’s there but in general if you are looking at pricing page it means you’re curiosity is generally piqued. That’s why we focused there. It’s also an encouraging sign that our rate of new signs ups is higher than our increase in people viewing the sign up page.

Needless to say we’re really pleased so far. Prospects are diving deeper to pricing, more are going to our sign up page and a even higher % are converting from our sign up page into trials. One thing that’s harder to track is the quality of sign ups. We’ve noticed a trend toward a better mix between “john@hotmail.com” to corporate domain’s in our email sign up list – it’s kind of anecdotal and a short period to judge that part on so we’ll see if it holds.

I’ll talk about what we’ve seen with Spreedly Core in another entry soon. Again, I recommend getting an outside set of eyes and ears for a project like this. We used Knurture – there are many options obviously – but any help is invaluable.

It’s been a busy couple of months at Spreedly. Firstly, we migrated to a new datacenter. A longer blog post on that is forthcoming. There were more hiccups than we had planned and a lot of red eyes and frayed nerves. Nevertheless, there is a lot of goodness with that move that we’ll talk about very soon. We’re sort of in a “don’t jinx it” mode right now so I can’t get anyone to post just yet.

Secondly, we rolled out new functionality. One thing we hear time and again is how difficult it is to scale subscriptions. Customer and sales driven requests can equate to subscription plans resembling bunny rabbits – multiplying at a rapid rate. “Open Invoicing” is our answer to that.

Thirdly, our new home page design is in place. I think it better explains who we are and why Spreedly. We’ll continue to iterate the site – our next big goal is to get Spreedly Core more attention from our current traffic. I also plan a more detailed blog post to share what we’ve seen as a result of our redesign. We worked with an outside group – Knurture – and highly recommend them. My sense is they’re an agency that thinks and works like developers.

January was a record month for transactions. We were up more than 30% in total transaction volume over December alone. It was a great way to start off the new year for us and obviously for our customers too.

Last but not least we added Scott Klein. He’s hit the ground running and is working on enhancing our email customization process. It’s always great having a fresh set of eyes and ears from code to strategy.

Now onto the subject at hand. Some of our biggest customers started life as humble startups. We talked to successful customers, and to current prospects that might be tomorrow’s successful startups. We then matched that to our goals and designed a new offering. Nearly all successful startups had the following feedback: i) They created a “launch budget” which included one time set up fees and costs to get going. ii) They knew after their initial launch that traction and revenue would take time. Therefore, ongoing costs were much more problematic than up front costs (assuming there was a reasonable relationship between the two).

With that in mind we’re announcing startup pricing. There are two choices:

• Pay a one time fee of $149 and then pay no monthly fee for 6 months or
• Pay a one time fee of $249 and pay no monthly fee for 12 months.

This equates to a 50% discount on our monthly rate for plan 1 and nearly 60% for the 12-month plan. With the 6-month option you then pay only 40 cents per transaction. With the 12 month option you pay just 30 cents per transaction.

We’re aiming this at startups. So what is a startup? Great question. We’re thinking your business is doing $0 per month to maybe a maximum of $3000 a month in revenue (that’s your revenue, not Spreedly fees) during the first few months on Spreedly. We understand (hope?) that many of you will go through that amount during the course of the program. We’re just focused on the first few months. Yes, existing Spreedly customers who are within these parameters can switch over. You’ll just need to email sales@spreedly.com so we can work out the logistics.

We’re trying this for a two-week period. Maybe we’ve calculated incorrectly and people won’t find it compelling. Maybe it’ll work out really well and we’ll make it permanent. Don’t worry, if you sign up for the program you will be covered for the time period no matter what happens. In terms of locking it in we commit to keeping the offer open until no later than the end of February 2012.

As with all things pricing I’m sure we’ll get some lively emails and feedback. I hope many of you though find it helpful and join Spreedly.

Most people assume subscription sites are pretty straight forward. You have 3 or 4 plans ranging from beginner to advanced. People sign up for the applicable plan. Hopefully for all parties involved they grow over time and need to upgrade your plans. There are definitely a lot of businesses for whom this works.

However, there are a bunch of other businesses for whom this model either doesn’t ever work or for whom it breaks down as they scale. In general we’ve seen these break into two general cases:

• I’m a cloud based consumption service (think Heroku). I know each month I’ll need to bill my customer something. Yet each month is different and no two customers are the same.
• Once I started to hit scale my idea of 3 to 4 simple plans broke down. Right now I’m up to around 30 plans on the backend with no slowdown in site. This isn’t scaling well.

With that in mind we want to announce a big new feature we’ve built the first version of: we’re calling it “Open Invoicing” for now. In a nutshell, it’s the anti subscription plan invoice. It allows you to use Spreedly to invoice a customer without having to specify an actual subscription plan to invoice against. It’s early, and we’re looking for feedback, so we’d love for you to try it out.

Open Invoicing is available to all our customers as part of our normal pricing.

I read an interesting blog post by Justin Vincent recently titled How I converted from PayPal to Stripe in just two days. For start ups and small businesses it has always been a headache to set up on the web and securely accept credit cards in a PCI compliant manner – although I think it’s better than back in 2010 when Sachin wrote this now famous post. PayPal was arguably the first to solve the problem of having to get a separate internet merchant account and gateway by bundling it all into one. Alas, time and success seems to have resulted in mixed feelings around the PayPal API and/or customer support experience. There are a fair number of horror stories about how PayPal has negatively impacted a business in one way or another. Some criticism is probably unfair (fraud is a nightmare to manage) while some of it certainly seems legitimate. It also doesn’t help that in many instances your customer has to leave your site to go to an external PayPal page for transactions.

Braintree appears to be the first to seize upon discontent with what some people felt like were archaic API’s and/or poor service by existing gateways. From what I’ve read and heard they came at it with a Zappos approach. This is your billing, this is critically important, so why would you not want the best possible experience when interacting with your provider in this space? Having recenty raised $34 million it appears they understood the opportunity well. However, Braintree has a minimum monthly fee of $75 which is prohibitive to smaller business. Stripe steps in with no minimum, a great API and documentation and it’s off to the races! Here’s one example of the initial response to Stripe’s arrival

Stripe takes a higher % of your transaction though – perhaps to offset that lack of a monthly fee and the convenient service they provide. So discussions about Stripe tend to fall into one of two categories pretty quickly:

• This is a hobby/lifestyle business for me so I’m not really concerned about 0.5% to 1% difference in transaction fees
• A smarter API and documentation along with a single source (merchant account and gateway bundled together) is very nice but too expensive a luxury at those fees

Let’s put the hobbyists and lifestyle businesses to the side for one moment. If you have one of those (less than $3000 a month in sales?) the good news is you have more choices than ever to hit the ground running.

For the rest of you though, you’re faced with the following conundrum:

• Which API do I code against?
• Which gateway/merchant account do I select?
• Do I sign with one of the bigger ones and pay higher monthly fees to get access to a lower discount rate or do I go with a smaller gateway and pay higher fees for now and know I’ll have to change later when I grow?

Here’s how one industry veteran of online commerce put it to me. “Gateway/Merchant accounts are like a vacation. You can have a fantastic vacation when you’re 18, 38 and 58 – but it’s unlikely to be at the same location. Make sure you can change vacation locations to suit your ever changing needs”

That’s a big part of the value prop behind Spreedly Core. To keep with the analogy above: How do you avoid continually vacationing at Disneyland because you really enjoyed it when you were 12? There’s 3 or 4 reasons why that might happen:

• Outsourcing and storing your credit cards at your gateway to tackle PCI compliance made sense at the time. However, now they, not you, have all your credit card information.
• You coded directly against the gateway API. Perhaps even more problematically – you went further and utilized API’s for more advanced functionality like recurring billing
• You wanted to have more than one merchant account gateway for financial or strategic (failover recovery) reasons
• It never occurred to you that as you grew you would be eligible for a much better set of fees or a more comprehensive range of services

In terms of the first bullet point – it’s important to point out that newer offerings like Braintree and Stripe are willing to return your customer data. Other’s are arguably not so kind and either way it’s a pain to manage.

Going back to Justin’s article above in our example we’ve had customers move from PayPal to Stripe in an hour or two.

Today it costs 2 cents to store a card and 10 cents a transaction as we come out of beta. Yes, that’s on top of whatever fees you pay a gateway and merchant account. It should be noted that most gateways have some fees for storing cards on your behalf so you would not have to sign up for those. Authorize.net calls it a “CIM” and charges a flat $20 per month while Braintree is $20 per month for a “vault” + 1 cent per card.

Core requires you to bring your own front end – whether that’s a commerce cart, subscription page or the ability to do a unique invoice each time that you want billed (cloud utility or pay as you go type services where no two invoices are the same). We think of Core as a cloud based billing utility designed to scale both for your and our business.

We look forward to bringing Spreedly Core officially out of beta at the end of this month and merging it into our main site at spreedly.com. Let us know here, or directly via email, what you think. We are also really interested in the feedback from all quarters.

P.S: Given that Core came out of our Spreedly subscription offering the benefits listed above are also enjoyed by our subscription customers.

Spreedly Subscriptions went into emergency maintenance mode for about 50 minutes today. We apologize for the incident and any inconvenience that occurred. We are acutely aware that you depend on our availability and we take that responsibility seriously. Ironically, what triggered the incident was a small part of a much larger plan to move data centers with zero downtime. This is not how we wanted to break the news of our new facilities.

To make the move we needed to extend our MySQL replication chain to the new data center. In the process of doing so, a database dump was accidentally loaded onto the primary database at the production data center. The intended target was the primary database at the new data center. This caused tables to be dropped and reloaded all while the site was online. We can refer to this timeframe as the “disaster window.” The error was caught when we noticed our new database’s storage wasn’t filling. At that point, we went into emergency maintenance mode to begin recovering.

While in maintenance mode, we restored all data from the latest backup. This particular backup was originally made to seed the new sql nodes at the new data center, so it was less than an hour old. Once imported, we brought the site back online. Then we manually handled the tough work of restoring the data that came via API while the database was tearing itself apart. With this done we were fully recovered.

Again, our apologies for any issues this may have caused you and your business. In brighter news, the original task of enabling site-to-site database replication has been completed as well and puts us one step closer to a very big upgrade for Spreedly and its customers.

There’s an interesting blog post over at RoRe comparing Stripe vs ActiveMerchant Given this is an area of interest for many of our US customers (Stripe is currently only available in the US) I thought I’d highlight it here. As it relates to Spreedly Core customers who are using Stripe the situation is slightly different. That’s because Spreedly Core is handling the credit card storage and processing these types of requests . Here’s the documentation if you want to dig deeper. Feel free to ask any questions here or add to the discussion over at RoR.

Going forward, we are going to highlight Spreedly customers. We do that with two goals in mind. Firstly, many of our customers are in start up mode and we’re happy to help in any way we can with getting the word out. Secondly, it might help prospective customers as they research our space in general. So here we go with Realtyninja.com

Tell us a little about your offering. How did you come up with the idea? What need did you see that wasn’t being fulfilled as well as you’d like?

We had been building custom real estate websites for years and found that we were targeting the few people in the industry who could afford or really utilize a full blown custom site. Not only was this model not sustainable in the long run but we found that it was not fulfilling the needs of our market. There are numerous companies who provide real estate agents with websites, but we found they were all far to complex, were not visually appealing and were approaching it from the wrong direction. It is our belief that you should start by looking at the problems you are trying to solve and the desired outcomes of using a service like our own: saving time and generating leads. Again this comes back to the less is more approach, not simply throwing technology at the problem. In fact, the more our clients can essentially forget about the technology while still getting the results they desire, the better. To sound a tad cliche, we focus on the why not the what.

RealtyNinja makes creating and managing your real estate website a breeze. It allows you to focus on your core business and takes the stress out of maintaining your website. We have all the features in our sites needed to be a successful real estate agent and have paired them with beautiful designs and an incredibly simple management interface. We focus on fostering an awesome experience from start to finish. We do not strive to have the most advanced system with the longest list of features because that is going to be far too complex for the bulk of ones needs and will simply get in the way. Instead we focus on providing the simplest and most polished interface and follow the concept of the minimum effective dose. What is the least amount of time and effort you can spend as a user of our system to get the maximum output. People are far to busy doing their real job (selling real estate) to take advantage of or really care about a laundry list of features. We only build features that save an agent time or directly help generate more leads. If a feature does not do either or at least one, we simply forget about it.

Spreedly has a lot of developers as customers. If applicable, tell us a little about the technology decisions you’ve made up to this point to drive your business. Do you think technology will be a key differentiator in your success and if yes how so?

Technology is definitely a key differentiator in our product and in our business as a whole. I see it as one of our main strengths and part of the reason we are all so inspired to come to work and give it our all every morning. At the core we are a group of geeks who are inspired by the potential of technology, design and the internet. We channel this energy and enthusiasm into our medium which happens to be a real estate website SaaS app at this point in time.

The technology we use allows us to be incredibly agile, react quickly and stay ahead of some of our much larger and heavier competition. Not to mention satiate our need to flirt with the bleeding edge and hone our ninja skills. We are big proponents of standing on the shoulders of giants and not reinventing the wheel when it doesn’t have to be. We want to use tools and technologies created by people who are the best at what they do as we can’t simply be the best at everything on our own.

A prime example of this would be our decision to use Spreedly to handle our billing system. At first we were going to roll our own and even started blocking out the code but quickly realized that we were entering the realm of a completely different skill set and business. PCI compliance, fraud protection, real time API’s with very sensitive data, dealing with real people’s real money… it was starting to freak us out and was turning into a major stressor. Not only was Spreedly incredibly easy to implement (!!) but the marginal costs have been more than worth the freedom of mind and worry free sleeps =)

Here is a short list of the tools we use on a daily basis:

• SPREEDLY!!!
• Linux
• nginx (so fast like ninja!)
• Perl the amazing Catalyst web framework
• template::toolkit, DBIx::Class and so many more modules on CPAN
• Javascript and Jquery
• Fancybox
• basecamp, campfire, highrise
• beanstalkapp
• TheSchwartz queueing system
• rangy So many more!

What are the two or three things that are your top priority right now for where you are as a business? Why are they important?

1. Scaling our awesome customer support and experience because this cannot be automated (to a point). This is one of our main differentiating factors and is in our mind the key to our success in the long run.
2. Systemizing our internal processes so we can focus on what is important: our clients and our application. We are the definition of bootstrapping and thus a lot of our internal systems and procedures are handled manually or have a lot of room for improvement.
3. Getting to the point with RealtyNinja where we do not have to run our consulting business on the side to pick up the slack. We want to focus on RealtyNinja 100% and it is very difficult and stressful to run 2 business that both demand 110% of your attention

Why did you choose Spreedly over other options? Do you have any comments or advice for current or potentially future Spreedly customers based on your experiences?

We chose Spreedly for the simple reason that they were the best option on the table. We have stuck with spreedly and plan to do so in the long term because for what we need, they are still the best option. Not to mention the customer support is amazing and we feel like we share a bond in the start-up world. We are walking the same path, facing the same challenges and feel that a bond such as this cannot be replaced with an extra feature here or there or different pricing structure. Just as we are dedicated to making the best real estate website SaaS application, we know and rest assured that spreedly is dedicated to being the best at what they do and what we need.

I’m writing this based on the fiasco this week around PayPal and Regretsy It’s a reminder of the sort of power that your gateway and merchant account can have – and why having the ability to change quickly might be a good idea.

Getting a gateway and a merchant account can feel like an impediment when thinking about commerce online – especially for a start up. We understand that. Therefore many people do a quick price comparison, scour the web for good or bad comments, and jump in. At Spreedly we believe to write to just one gateway is a risky proposition. Therefore, a guiding principle here is to create gateway independence. We’ve connected to 25+ gateways Now, you still have to pick an initial gateway and merchant account. We focus on making sure we support your choice.

Why is it risky? Let’s say you decide you want to change your gateway. It might be that you’re unhappy with your current choice. Support might not be what you were hoping for or, as you grow, you realize that a few basis points difference is really starting to add up. Or it might be that you’re happy with your current offering but a new gateway comes along that you find very compelling and desire to switch.

If you had written to the Spreedly API – and we support your new gateway – switching is simple. If you have written directly to the gateway you have to now write to a new gateway API. Doable, but a real dampener on change. Secondly, if you’ve written to Spreedly we have retained your customer credit card information. No asking politely and hoping that your gateway will return it to you. Some make it very difficult (impossible?) while others make it easier. Either way it’s their least favorite type of support request and in all fairness, given PCI requirements, is not as straight forward as attaching a spreadsheet on an email. However, you really have no choice but to grit it out and get your customer data back. Otherwise you’re looking at significant churn when, after changing gateways, you require your customers to re-enter their credit card information because you couldn’t bring it over. I’ve heard anecdotal stories of people who went down that route rather than continue to wait for their old gateway to come good.

That’s why we see two types of customers. Those that are new to launching their service and shop gateway’s based on price and word of mouth. Then there is the second group – “not my first time at the rodeo” type . Their eyes light up when they realize they can have their favorite gateway and gateway independence too.